Founding Feminists: September 18, 1968

Alice Paul is in full fighting mode today, and women are preparing to risk arrest and engage in civil disobedience if necessary. Though this sounds like a report from the suffrage battlefront 50 years ago, it’s not. One major difference between 1918 and 1968 is that back then, the National Woman’s Party wanted Congress to pass something (the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, assuring women of their right to vote) whereas today they want Congress to defeat something: a bill to confiscate 2/3 of historic Sewall-Belmont House property to build a driveway for an expanded New Senate Office Building. The party has always tried to have its headquarters as close to the center of political action as possible, but at the moment it may seem a bit too close.

The National Woman’s Party has had its offices and officers’ living quarters at Sewall-Belmont House since 1929, when it became the group’s fifth and final headquarters. The house itself is one of the oldest homes on Capitol Hill. Robert Sewall completed construction on the original house by 1800, and rented it to Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin from 1801 to 1813. During the War of 1812, the house was burned by invading British troops in August, 1814, when it was used to resist their advance on Washington. Sewall rebuilt the house after the war, and it remained in his family for over a century, until purchased by Senator Porter Dale in 1922. He sold it to Alva Belmont in 1929, so that she could donate it to the National Woman’s Party as their new headquarters.

It is believed that the Joint Committee on Landmarks, in a report that will be delivered to the National Capital Planning Commission, thinks that after studying the matter for three years, the house belongs in the “landmark” category. But Rep. Kenneth Gray, Democrat of Illinois, disagrees. A member of the Public Works Committee, he has been engaging in unethical tactics to steamroll this controversial bill through the House after it was passed by the Senate.

He has presented his bill as just a “housekeeping” measure that ought to be passed by the House as a simple courtesy to the Senate, and has reportedly misinformed members of Congress that an agreement was reached with the National Woman’s Party to sell the land for $50,000. He has said that Sewall-Belmont House is “unsightly” and of “no historical significance” and that the apartments used by N.W.P. officers are in disrepair and “will fall down anyway.”

The bill was originally introduced by Senator Ralph Yarborough, Democrat of Texas, and it excludes from condemnation the central portion of the building and a small lot, but confiscates the majority of the property. “It’s all one building and one historical landmark,” says Alice Paul, N.W.P.’s founder.

When the bill first came up for discussion in the House on August 2nd, Rep. Edith Green, Democrat of Oregon, noted that the Senate had passed it by only a ratio of 4-3, hardly the kind of near-unanimous vote normally cast for uncontroversial “housekeeping” measures. Others objected to trying to push it through when so many members were away attending their parties’ national conventions in Miami and Chicago.

Alice Paul, 83, is as actively involved in this new campaign as the one half a century ago. Today she phoned N.W.P. president Emma Guffey Miller’s home in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to discuss strategy, then sent telegrams to House Majority Whip Hale Boggs, Democrat of Louisiana, and Senator Everett B. Jordan, Democrat of North Carolina, asking them to delay action, citing the findings of the Joint Commission on Landmarks.

But if conventional methods fail, the National Woman’s Party knows how to escalate. And this time they have a new ally. Barbara Ireton, president of the National Capital Area Chapter of the National Organization for Women said it was decided at meetings held today in Washington and New York that if necessary, a ring of women will surround the property to protect it if the House passes the condemnation bill and President Johnson doesn’t veto it.

So, history may repeat itself half a century after the National Woman’s Party’s “Silent Sentinels” went to jail in D.C. for peacefully protesting along the White House fence in favor of woman suffrage.

David Dismore

David became a lifelong admirer of the suffragists after briefly encountering them in a high school textbook in the early 1960s. Though missing out on that first part of the struggle for equality, he became active in "second wave" feminism through LA NOW in 1974 and has been a full-time feminist, TV news archivist, and women's history researcher at the Feminist Majority Foundation since its creation.